1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to devices for the shuffling and dealing of playing cards.
2. Description of Prior Art
The game of contract bridge is widely played; it is estimated that there are 30 million bridge players in the United States alone. The two principal variants of the game are rubber bridge and duplicate bridge. In rubber bridge the cards are randomly shuffled and distributed to the players each hand; in duplicate bridge the hand that is played has to be preserved (or duplicated) so as to be playable by other players. This allows for comparison of scores that eliminates the "luck of the draw" since comparisons are made between players who have held the identical card distributions.
The present invention is designed to fulfill the following needs:
1. It may be the desire of the participants in a bridge session to constrain the random distribution of cards. For example, they may wish to primarily produce hands that will produce game bids, or hands that favor no-trump bidding, or hands that have unusual distributions, etc. Or they might wish to establish a constraint that both pairs in the game will, over the course of the session, receive approximately the same number of "high cards".
2. In a duplicate bridge environment, the system will allow for the same hands to be played at different tables over the course of the session without any requirement for physically moving cards from one table to another. Information on the hands played may be electronically collected and off loaded to a central computer for tournament scoring and production of individual result summaries.
3. In a teaching environment, hands of pedagogical merit or historical interest can be distributed.
A number of different approaches to fulfilling one or more of the above needs have been proposed. One approach (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,951,950, 4,534,562--first embodiment, 5,067,713) involves coding a deck of playing cards with bar codes or OCR font, and then inserting the cards one by one into a device that indicates (by illuminated light or other means) to which hand the dealer should manually distribute the card. The requirement for nonstandard (off the shelf) playing cards as well as the manual operation required to determine for each card which hand it belongs to make this approach both slower and more error-prone than the current invention. Other approaches (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,534,562--second embodiment, 4,822,050, 5,121,921), while still requiting non-standard cards, do proceed automatically through a deck of cards. However the transport mechanism are extended and cumbersome (U.S. Pat. No. 4,822,050) or involve elaborate mechanical gates and tape reader (U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,921), in contrast to the current invention which has a minimum of moving parts. U.S. Pat. No. 4,534,562 (second embodiment) has a gravity fed transport that may have problems with displacement of a card due to the friction between cards as well as not being able to control with any precision the timing of card movement, and the distribution means is extended resulting in a high profile system.